by Jeff Guinn
In the early fall, Charlie took the bus out on an extended road trip. Mary, Lynne, Pat, and Susan joined him, along with Susan’s friend Ella-Jo and another girl. Two men were along at the beginning of the trip, but they almost immediately dropped out after deciding that the vibe inside the bus was too strange. That didn’t sit well with Charlie, but he was mollified a few days later when Bruce Davis, a college dropout from Tennessee who had found his way to the California coast, was intrigued enough after meeting the girls to join the group. Davis soon had a new goal in life, to become Charlie’s second-in-command and order the women around whenever he had the opportunity. The girls considered him to be a pompous lightweight, but Charlie wanted them to accept him into the family and so they did.
Charlie next drove the group to San Jose, where he pulled up at the Moorehouse residence and summoned Dean outside to see how his original gift of a piano had morphed into a bus. Moorehouse wasn’t pleased to see Charlie. His wife had left him, in part because of Charlie absconding earlier that year with their teenage daughter, and Ruth Ann was also gone, off somewhere with her husband. Ruth Ann had obviously told her father everything about her brief adventure with Charlie, and now Moorehouse made it clear that Charlie was no longer welcome in his house. Charlie and his companions piled back in the bus and drove off. Moorehouse fumed for a few hours, then grabbed a shotgun and set off in pursuit. He had no trouble tracking the black school bus, and somewhere along the road he cornered Charlie, announced that he was going to kill him, and put the shotgun to his head. The others from the bus were frozen with fear; it was one thing to spout platitudes about death being the same as life, but this was actually happening—a man with a gun clearly intended to blow Charlie’s head off.
And then Charlie did something that seemed to them to confirm his specialness, even his divinity. This crazy man was about to murder him and Charlie wasn’t afraid. Moorehouse screamed that Charlie was about to die and Charlie smiled and said quietly, “Go ahead, shoot me,” which stopped Moorehouse cold because that was the last thing anybody in that situation could be expected to say. Charlie’s tone was calm and his voice didn’t quaver. He gently put his hand on Moorehouse’s shoulder and talked about how love was so much better than anger, and what a relief it was when you gave up your individuality and became part of a real family. Moorehouse put down the gun. Then Charlie dosed Moorehouse with some acid and everybody watched as the older man began having himself a fine trip. After a while Moorehouse wished everyone a pleasant goodbye and headed home. Charlie’s followers were awestruck. He clearly had no fear of death, and, maybe even more impressive, he’d faced down a father. That really got to the girls, since they all had struggled with parents. Charlie just grinned and acted like it was no big thing. He wanted to get back on the road; it was time to finish up in the Haight.
Charlie said later that he moved his followers from the Haight to Los Angeles in late 1967 because the Haight had become dangerous. But it had been that way ever since Charlie first got there back in April; he’d arrived at the beginning of the end. Group safety may have been a contributing factor, but the main reason Charlie wanted to move to L.A. was that he was prepared to audition for Gary Stromberg at Universal. He might have hoped, for a while, that his musical genius would be recognized and rewarded in the Haight. Like so many other hopefuls, he played his songs in the Panhandle, and in a few small clubs. But the recording industry was based in Los Angeles, and the L.A. reps who came to check out San Francisco talent left unimpressed. In their opinions, “Northern” musicians might wow spacey Fillmore or Avalon Ballroom audiences, but on the whole they simply didn’t have the professional chops to produce marketable studio product. San Francisco bands, in turn, considered themselves real and disdained many L.A. groups, including some of the most famous, as ersatz musicians whose hit records were the product of studio gimmickry. Everyone knew that the fabled Beach Boys used studio musicians known as the Wrecking Crew as a backing band on their albums, and rumors persisted that on the Byrds’ first massive hit, a cover of Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man,” four of the five Byrds didn’t perform at all because their whiz-kid producer, Terry Melcher, decreed that they weren’t competent enough on their instruments. In June 1967 many of the San Francisco bands got their first real national exposure performing at the Monterey Pop Festival, a historic event bringing together the best of the Los Angeles and San Francisco music scenes along with a few British groups and soul performers. But most of the organizers were from Los Angeles, and L.A. players got the prime performance slots. The bottom line was unmistakable to even the most holier-than-thou San Francisco musicians. Acerbic Frank Zappa, whose Mothers of Invention snared a contract after performing at the Whisky a Go Go on L.A.’s Sunset Strip, summarized it best: “No matter how ‘peace-love’ the San Francisco bands might try to make themselves, they eventually had to come south to evil ol’ [L.A.] to get a record deal.” The Grateful Dead did, and so did Big Brother with Janis Joplin. Charlie believed that it was his turn. In November, his parole supervision was transferred from San Francisco to Los Angeles, where Charlie felt certain that he would realize his dream of worldwide fame.
CHAPTER EIGHT
L.A.
Little about Los Angeles in its early incarnations indicated that it would become one of the cultural centers of the world. Flanked by ocean, mountains, valleys, and desert, it first flourished as a seaport, then expanded with an influx of miners during the California Gold Rush of the mid-1800s, benefited from a subsequent oil boom, and, thanks to its annexation of the sprawling, fertile San Fernando Valley, became an agricultural Eden. From the first, fiercely conservative business leaders dominated local politics as well as the economy. City expansion was carefully controlled. As much or more than any other major city in America, Los Angeles became a place of class and racial partition, where everyone’s place was defined not only by what they earned but where they lived. L.A. remained predominantly white until World War II created vast new demands on national industry. Federal legislation forbidding discrimination in government hiring resulted in the arrival of blacks from all over the country, lured by jobs with guaranteed decent pay. As many as one thousand flooded in each week. Blocked from living where they pleased by discriminatory local regulations on rentals and housing purchases, many of them were relegated to the substandard environs of Watts, an immense community in South Central L.A. that became widely known as “Mud Town.”
African Americans weren’t welcomed to L.A., but show business personalities were. Hollywood was little more than a sleepy community northwest of downtown L.A. until the early 1900s, when it became the central production site of motion pictures. These took the nation by storm, especially after the advent of talkies in 1927 with The Jazz Singer. Until then, the American entertainment industry was dominated by the East Coast and vaudeville. As radio, and then television, muscled their way into U.S. households, L.A. became the center of these creative industries, too. The rugged hills outside the city especially lent themselves to filming the ubiquitous TV westerns of the 1950s. Though many city leaders personally disapproved of show people and their often excessive lifestyles, the entertainment business quickly became a mainstay of the local economy, attracting tourists as well as providing tens of thousands of jobs. A pragmatic approach to controlling vice was necessary, allowing important people to play as they pleased and requiring everyone else to stay in line. The key was an organization best known for its own history of corruption—the notorious Los Angeles Police Department.
Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, best-selling authors earned fortunes with noir tales of crooked L.A. cops. But in 1950 new Chief of Police Bill Parker promised significant changes. Under Parker, officers were on the streets to enforce the law, not to make friends. All street personnel were rotated on a frequent basis to prevent them being influenced by civilian acquaintances. Even as the L.A. population became more racially and ethnically mixed, its police department remained virtually all-white. Many crew c
ut recruits came straight from the military, a great many were from the South, and few were educated beyond high school. Pre-employment interviews weeded out applicants who sympathized with minorities, especially those who in any way supported the civil rights movement. Seminars were held for L.A. cops where lectures assured them that Martin Luther King Jr. and other black civil rights leaders were financed by the Communist Party. Officers were encouraged to believe that they were all that stood between order and anarchy in Los Angeles, especially where minorities were concerned. Street cops were authorized to make black-and-blue examples of people who defied them or even appeared that they might. Parker would fire any officer even slightly suspected of taking a bribe, but his administration fiercely defended LAPD cops accused of using excessive force. Parker kept the City Council happy with regular reports of law enforcement successes. Rising numbers of arrests were valued by them, and therefore by the chief, more than establishing programs dedicated to crime prevention—the number of prevented crimes could only be estimated, but actual arrests were quantifiable. These numbers looked good in the newspapers and impressive to taxpayers.
But the LAPD crackdown under Parker had exceptions. The city’s most famous citizens, the movie and television and singing stars and their assorted producers and directors, were understood to be sacrosanct. Officers catching them in the act of driving drunk or getting in scuffles or committing any crime short of cold-blooded murder in the presence of too many unimpeachable witnesses were expected to politely intervene and ensure that the celebrities got home safely. This largesse extended to entire families; cops working in the toniest parts of town were expected by supervisors to recognize celebrities and their offspring on sight and treat them accordingly.
One evening in the early 1960s, four teenage boys set off in a car for some high-spirited fun. The driver was Terry Melcher, son of singer-actress Doris Day. Beside him in the front seat was Dean Martin Jr., known to his pals as Dino. In the backseat sat Dennis Wilson, a kid from the working-class suburb of Hawthorne and a drummer in a band called the Beach Boys that had just reached the pop charts for the first time. The fourth passenger, sitting next to Dennis, was Gregg Jakobson, who had not yet made his own mark in the music industry and so had no celebrity stature, only his friendship with the other three. Melcher drove into a residential construction area on a street above Beverly Hills and parked the car. He and Martin got out, rummaged in the trunk, and pulled out a massive Magnum handgun. Telling his friends that “I’m going to get it sighted in,” Melcher proceeded to shatter several newly installed streetlights. The loud booms of the shots reverberated down the hill, and just as Melcher blasted his third or fourth light an LAPD cruiser bore down on him, siren blaring and lights flashing. Wilson and Jakobson, still in the backseat of Melcher’s car, panicked. They’d heard about what L.A. cops did to people and expected the worst. They couldn’t understand why Terry and Dino waited calmly in the street as two LAPD officers emerged from the black-and-white.
One cop, young enough to perhaps be a rookie, had his hand on his gun and was clearly ready for trouble. But his partner, a grizzled sergeant, pulled him back, smiled, and said politely, “Hello, Mr. Melcher.” Melcher nodded and Martin said, “Nice evening, officer.” With a regretful shake of his head, as though he hoped everyone understood that he had no choice other than to enforce a foolish rule, the sergeant held out his hand for Melcher’s Magnum, saying, “You know, we have to confiscate your gun.” He quickly added that Mr. Melcher could come by the station anytime the next day to pick it up. After cautioning Melcher to drive carefully, the sergeant herded his younger colleague back to their patrol car and drove away, leaving Melcher and Martin laughing behind them in the street. Back in the car, Wilson and Jakobson, stunned by what they’d just witnessed, mopped nervous sweat from their faces. “I learned that there was a completely different set of rules, a different sense of justice in L.A. for the rich,” Jakobson recalls. “Dennis and I were shit-scared kids and Terry and Dino knew that they were royalty. That’s what celebrity status gave you in L.A.”
As Los Angeles continued to grow, so did the gulf between haves and have-nots. Among the most obvious barriers were the burgeoning L.A. freeways. These neatly separated communities, in particular making access to some higher-end districts deliberately difficult because of limited off-ramps. Beyond the service hours and reach of public transportation, it became impossible to get from one part of the city to another without an automobile. Many poorer city residents didn’t own cars, so they were confined to their own neighborhoods. Isolating riffraff fit perfectly into leadership’s goal of keeping L.A. clean and relatively crime-free. The police always knew where most of the bad elements were and could allocate personnel accordingly.
Even as most of the rest of the city thrived, conditions in the Watts section deteriorated. For anyone standing outside, it was difficult to carry on conversations because flight paths into and out of the busy Los Angeles International Airport were routed directly overhead—no coincidence, Watts residents felt certain. Unlike white kids in the rest of the city and the suburbs, on weekends Watts teens couldn’t borrow the family car to head to the beach or the mountains or the hot clubs on the Strip. They were trapped in their depressing neighborhood with little to do but take out their frustration on each other. Gangs fought each other to the death for control of dilapidated blocks, defying efforts by the Black Panthers to keep the peace. Watts adults were no better off; defense industry jobs had dried up, and by 1965 three-quarters of all adult Watts males were unemployed and six out of ten families depended on welfare to survive. Antagonistic L.A. street cops and a handful of California Highway Patrol officers were visible daily symbols of white oppression in the seething, forty-six-square-mile ghetto roughly the size of central San Francisco. Something had to give, and on the terribly hot night of August 11, 1965, it did.
California Highway Patrol officer Lee Minikus didn’t expect trouble when he pulled over twenty-one-year-old Marquette Frye for drunk driving on a Watts street. Frye failed a field sobriety test and laughed as he did. A crowd of onlookers observed but wasn’t threatening. Minikus and Frye were chuckling together as the officer and his partner prepared to take Frye off to jail. But then Frye’s mother and brother arrived and started yelling. Encouraged by his relatives, Frye began shouting, too. Their raised voices incited the crowd to begin screaming threats, more people heard the uproar and came running, Minikus radioed for backup, and the most notorious race riot in American history was under way. The Watts riot lasted six days and resulted in thirty-four dead, more than one thousand injured, four thousand arrests, and $40 million in property damage. An estimated thirty thousand people, most of them Watts residents, participated in violent, criminal acts that ranged from looting stores to attacking police patrol cars with Molotov cocktails. One hundred and three LAPD patrol cars were brought in to help quell the violence, and all 103 were badly damaged. Fourteen thousand National Guardsmen joined every active member of the LAPD before the riot finally dwindled down, not because of any community-wide contrition or effective damage control by the police, but because the rioters finally ran out of energy and places to loot and burn; almost every business in Watts with something to steal or destroy was gutted.
There had been race riots in modern-day American cities before—Chicago, Harlem, the spate across the nation in the summer of 1964—but none ever struck more fear in white America than this one. Part of it was the city where it occurred. It seemed logical, even predictable, that angry low-income blacks might rise up in bustling metropolises like New York and Chicago, or in Washington, D.C., where there was such a large minority population. But to the rest of the country, Los Angeles epitomized sunshine and show business and a laid-back attitude. A massive race riot in L.A. signaled that there could be one anywhere. California governor Pat Brown organized a commission to determine the cause of the Watts debacle, and in December it reported in stark, prescient terms that “the existing breach between rich
and poor, black and white, in Los Angeles could blow up [again] one day in the future.”
For Chief Parker, the 1965 Watts riot offered a welcome chance to increase public support of the LAPD by persuading shaken white residents that without the protection of their stalwart police force, the next L.A. neighborhood razed by black rioters might very well be their own. In one TV appearance he warned, “It is estimated that by 1970, 45 percent of the metropolitan area of Los Angeles will be Negro. If you want any protection for your home . . . you’re going to have to get in and support a strong police department. If you don’t, come 1970, God help you.”
In Watts life went on exactly as before, but with charred rubble on virtually every corner. Parker’s scare tactics worked, and race-related paranoia spread beyond the ghetto. After Parker died of a heart attack in July 1966 (he collapsed at an awards dinner in his honor), his successor, Tom Reddin, dutifully carried on his policies. When black outsiders turned up in white neighborhoods at any hour, it became routine for nervous residents to call the cops, and the police instantly responded. Blacks living in Watts were used to being stopped by cops and questioned about what they might be up to. Now blacks in every part of Los Angeles found themselves fair game for arbitrary stops and interrogations. Whites venturing into Watts were also pulled over, but in these cases the cops would warn them to lock their car doors, drive out fast, and not even stop for red lights because their lives were in danger. An ominous sense of ever-imminent racial violence settled over much of the city like the infamous brown L.A. smog. It wasn’t the in-your-face tension of major Eastern cities like New York, where every subway ride offered opportunities for racial conflict. In many parts of L.A., blacks and whites rarely came into contact. But the feeling didn’t go away.